What is this about?
This package uses bookdown to turn plain text files into a songbook. Since it’s using bookdown, a plethora of output formats are are available: beautiful html sites, pdf documents, docx files and epub just to name a few of them. Check the bookdown documentation for more information on this.
The key concept behind this package is the following: You copy and paste plain text lyrics (with or without guitar chord information) from a site like https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/ or similar1 and save it as “songname.txt” within an R-Project. You then add some metadata to this song using a yaml-style header. The songbook package then uses these textfiles to generate intermediate files that in turn will be used by bookdown to create a songbook.
Just as knitr leverages pandoc (see image below), songbookdown leverages bookdown and the rest of the tools to build an awesome songbook.
1 Remember to mention the source!
Why use songbookdown?
The package offers a way to specify typical song related metadata in a simple and structured way without thinking about how this metadata is used and displayed in the output. Such song related data can be title of the song, artist, tempo etc.